The Self-Anointed

THE SELF-ANOINTED

Because of the steady triumph of pagan humanism in the West, the modern world has seen the re-emergence of many archaic oddities, one of which is a self-anointed elite class – the intelligentsia – a secular substitute for pastor and priest. The first truly modern intellectual, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, set a recognizable tone for the emergence of a self-righteous secular elite, making much of loving an abstraction called “the people,” freeing them from the shackles of civilization and tradition, and establishing their “general will.” But in the end, he could not disguise his disdain for humanity and likened the masses of ordinary people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.”1 A more recent defining example of this new class – still celebrated amongst cultural elites today – is George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and public intellectual prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond writing plays, Shaw held forth on all kinds of cultural and political subjects and made grand sweeping pronouncements about his fellow human beings. Like many British intellectuals of the era, he was a Fabian socialist who nonetheless regarded ordinary working people as contemptible with “no right to live.” He wrote, “I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.”2 Shaw was also an admirer of dictators and political dictatorships precisely because he resented ordinary people influencing culture, believing they could not make sensible decisions. On leaving London for an African vacation in 1935, he remarked, “It is nice to go for a

holiday and know that Hitler has settled everything so well in Europe.”3 Though Hitler’s antisemitism eventually made it untenable for Shaw to support the national socialism of the Nazis, he remained keen on Stalin and the Soviet dictatorship.4

Jean-Paul Sartre, another twentieth-century Western intellectual with a massive cult following – well-known for seducing his young female philosophy students with the help of his lover, Simone de Beauvoir – like Shaw frequently involved himself in cultural and political affairs of which he clearly had no adequate understanding. A man addicted to fornication, alcohol and barbiturates, Sartre proved incapable of maintaining relationships with male intellectual peers who might actually challenge him, and like his radical compatriots, was unable to bring himself to condemn Stalinism or the Communist Party – though he remained gregariously antiAmerican. He was still publicly defending the Soviets in the 1950s and warmly praising Mao’s China. For Sartre, the remnants of an existing Christian political order in the West was simply ‘institutionalized violence’ that required ‘intellectual activism’ and ‘necessary violence’ to overthrow it.5 In our own time, a majority of Western intellectuals have followed in the wake of thinkers like Sartre and groups like the Frankfurt School, hastening Western culture down into ever deeper levels of depravity, confusion, irrationality and self-immolation.6 We are forced to ask as Christians, what has gone wrong?